Since I am fortunate enough to have visited Rog Factory, I thought I would write my own short letter of support, and ask the city’s officials a question. Please make any use of this you may see fit, or of course, none at all, if there is none:

ROG FACTORY is an abandoned building made useful and beautiful by those aspiring Slovenes who gave new and surprising potential to what had formerly been only rust and decay. Like the bicycles which once were made here, Rog Factory testifies to the compact power of a single body - or two, or maybe even three - for generating mobility in the city. Only now, the city in question has expanded to the urban networks of Europe, and mobility takes place in the realm of artistic practices, social and political inventions and philosophical ideas. If Ljubljana exists on the cultural map of Europe today, it is because of the astonishing philosophic and artistic mobility of those groups and individuals who have gathered in the city’s alternative spaces: Metelkova, the classic local of Slovenia’s post-communist vanguards, and Rog factory today. In places like these, the potential of the future can be continuously invented.

The paradox that presently confronts the city of Ljubljana is well known. With progressively deeper integration to the cultural circuits of Europe, due to the audacious brilliance of groups and individuals acting only on the strength of their own desire and their own spiritual and intellectual gifts, property values have risen. It is now mathematically "interesting" to devote the former sites of abandonment and rust, not to further explosions of culture and philosophical freedom, but instead to the banal and mathematical increase in the values of property. But doesn’t the "subprime crisis" now unfolding around the world shows us all too clearly where this kind of mathematics leads? The risk of calculations on pure property value is a meaninglessness even worse than rust and decay. The question that then arises is simply this: What does Ljubljana want for tomorrow? A subprime future for what has been one of the great artistic cities in Europe? Or instead, a new mobility of art, philosophy, solidarity and social invention in the twenty-first century?

Please add my name to the petition!

Brian Holmes Art and cultural critic 14 rue de Lunéville 75019 Paris, FRANCE